Review: Metro Warp Brings Aimless Walking Straight To Your Desktop

Metro Warp shows us the dystopian future your parents always feared, every oblivious pedestrian walking while only staring at the cellphone screens.

• Name: Metro Warp
• Genre: Pedestrian Management Simulator
• Players: 1
• Multiplayer: N/A
• Platforms: PC
• Developer: Another Yeti
• Publisher: Another Yeti
• Price: $9.99 (R130)
• Reviewed On: PC

Admit it, you’ve all been walking while looking at your phone and accidentally walked into something or, and this if far more embarrassing, someone. Now imagine that everybody just walked while looking at their phones. Throw in some slight restrictions and some weird floating worlds and you have the premise for Metro Warp.

Metro Warp is a 3D puzzle game that requires you to guide oblivious pedestrians who can only turn left through 50 floating worlds, using obstacles to guide them to the exit. This is a very simple premise that does manage to grab you from the start, but it struggles to keep its grips on you.

Such a simple first puzzle, the rest of the game should be a breeze!

The main idea of the game is to get a certain number of wayfarers through an exit on the map without having them collide with one another or fall into a pit of exposed wires. This sounds simple enough right? To make things a little more interesting, developers Another Yeti decided that they could only turn when faced with obstacles. This creates a sort of Lemmings-esque puzzle game where your objective is to guide the single minded walkers with the various obstacles the game provides you with.

It is important to remember the above details as, while they are quite easily picked up by simple observation, the game doesn’t like to tell you what is available to the player. To give you a basic tutorial, each puzzle has an entrance, an exit and an oddly shaped map that is contorted into strange shapes which occasionally have dangerous pits that are filled with live wires, not something you would want to fall into. As you know, the pedestrians you are meant to be guiding only walk in a straight line until they are unable to any further, to which they make the life changing decision to turn left and continue walking. Since you know this is the case, you the player have to guide these poor direction-less souls using one of the most important tools utilised in any metropolitan area, road signs. The signs available for you to place start off as simple obstacles, but you are later provided with signs that can change the turning direction of the walkers. There are even different coloured tickets that are required to enter the exit of the corresponding colour, which adds an additional depth to the game’s puzzles. This gives the player quite a few options for tackling the 50 puzzles the game throws at you.

The game’s puzzles are interesting, but sadly do not feel as rewarding as they could. The fact that they are 3D means that you are required to flip the map around to make sure you can see it from every perspective. So while the puzzles took a lot of fiddling with to complete, I didn’t feel any sense of achievement upon accomplishment. After figuring out what was available to you for a puzzle, it became a case of just putting down signs and testing out possible movement bit by bit until you find something that works. What is nice is that there is the option to stop, start, pause and adjust the movements of the pedestrians, which makes the whole trial and error process a lot more bearable. So in the end, while there were some challenging puzzles here and there, the simple methodical approach one has to make unfortunately kills the delight found in finally getting to the solution of a puzzle.

I always thought this is what forgetting about gravity would look like.

What is both nice and frustrating is that the game takes a non-linear approach to the players progression through the puzzles. Upon the completion of a puzzle, the player is presented with a number of options that they will be able to continue to. This is all well and good but there is no way to identify which of the puzzles you can move on to are the easier or more difficult ones. While this may seem like a rather pedantic criticism for something that isn’t really an issue considering you can just leave your progress on a puzzle to come back to at a later stage after doing an easier stage, it can attribute to someone losing interest in the game after having completed some more difficult puzzles but being forced to complete simpler ones to progress.

So while the gameplay is solid, it is tough to not feel that there could have been more done to separate it from other, more compelling puzzle games. It has its moments where it gets tricky but these are few between puzzles that have a very monotonous feel about them.

At first glance, the simple design doesn’t immediately jump out at you but after spending some time with the game I have to admit that there is a very simple elegance to the game’s visual presentation. There is, due to the presentation, no way that one could be confused about what is going on in the game. The important aspects of the puzzles are designed to clearly show their purpose, which is possibly why they opted to not include any sort of explanation to the player.

Two Entrances One Exit.

If it had been any other way however, I feel like the game would have been dead in the water. It’s quite obvious what and where the entrances and exits are, clearly communicated the way they are designed, and hazards and other requirements to finish are also quite clear and obvious. It was nice that, while it was not always clear as to what the player was able to do, the players could easily grasp the idea of what had to be done.

For those who may be worried that Metro Warp does not feature the adequate representation of the people who would inhabit a metropolitan area, the pedestrians have randomised sex and gender. It is just unfortunate that they are all depicted as business people, there may be others with different lifestyles who could also be walking aimlessly.

So if the game is relatively easy on the eyes, how does it affect the ears? The audio of the game is rather basic, with the only sound effects being that of the exit counter counting down as people enter it and a generic sounding error noise when something goes wrong. These sounds feel very plain and the addition of some walking sound effects may would have been welcomed, just to add that feeling that there is indeed movement happening when you click start.

You need the correct ticket for each exit? When did life become this difficult?

What the game does do right is the soundtrack that is used as the background music of the game. The soundtrack of ambient electronic music facilitates a very calm feel for the game, creating an environment that is conducive to intense puzzle solving. The problem is that, while I did enjoy the music, I did find that it quickly became rather boring. The songs quickly found themselves being indiscernible from one another and even after enjoying the soundtrack I felt that the same song was getting repeated far too often. Its sound started off strong, but it inevitably played itself into a boring state of affairs.

On the whole, the game is totally playable and it is definitely possible to find some enjoyment in it. Someone who is not well-versed in puzzle games will definitely get something out of this title. It is fun and intriguing enough to keep you playing for a while, but it eventually doesn’t do enough to make you feel the need to play through until the end. Those who have been exposed to many a puzzle game may feel that, while the game does enough to warrant interest, it just doesn’t do enough to keep you interested in it. So while this review may seem very indecisive on the game, it is important for you to know that while the game’s presentation does well and that it stands to be a delightful challenge at times, you also have to make sure you have a firm understanding of what you want out of this title before making the decision to pick it up.

What’s worse than walking into someone? Probably cracking your phone’s screen because of it.

Name: Paul Roux
Location: Cape Town
Position: Author

Paul has published 146 posts. Read all of Paul's posts.

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